![]() | A Quick Tour of KStars |
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This chapter presents a guided tour of KStars, introducing many of its important features.
In the above screenshot, you can see the sky display centered on Betelgeuse, the brightest star in the constellation Orion. Orion has just risen above the eastern horizon horizon. Stars are displayed with realistic colors and relative brightnesses. The brightest stars have their names labeled (e.g., Betelgeuse). M 42, the Orion Nebula, is visible to the right of Orion's “belt” stars, just above the horizon. If you look closely, you can also see the planet Saturn in the upper left. In three corners of the Sky display, there are on-screen text labels displaying data on the current time (“LT: 12:29:51 03/23/03”), the current Geographic Location (“Baltimore, Maryland, USA”), and the current object in the center of the display (“Focused on: Betelgeuse (alpha Orionis)”). Above the sky display, there are two toolbars. The main toolbar contains shortcuts for menu functions, as well as a time-step widget which controls how fast the simulation clock runs. The view toolbar contains buttons that toggle the display of different kinds of objects in the sky. At the bottom of the window, there is a status bar which displays the name of any object you click on, and the sky coordinates (Right Ascension and Declination) of the mouse cursor.
The first thing to do is to set the geographic location. By default, KStars assumes you are in Greenwich, UK (home of the Royal Observatory, where longitude=0 is defined). Since you are probably somewhere else, you'll want to change this.
Open the Set Geographic Location window by selecting Set Geographic Location... from the Settings menu, or by pressing the Globe icon in the toolbar, or by typing Ctrl+g.
Here is a screenshot of the Set Geographic Location window:
There is a list of over 2500 predefined cities available to choose from. You set your location by highlighting a city from this list. Each city is represented in the world map as a small dot, and when a city is highlighted in the list, a red crosshairs appears on its location in the map.
It isn't practical to scroll through the full list of 2500 locations, looking for a specific city. To make searches easier, the list can be filtered by entering text in the boxes below the map. For example, in the screenshot, the text “Ba” appears in the City Filter box, while “M” has been entered in the Province Filter box, and “USA” is in the Country Filter box. Note that all of the cities displayed in the list have city, province, and country names that begin with the entered filter strings, and that the message below the filter boxes indicates that 7 cities are matched by the filters. Also notice that the dots representing these seven cities in the map have been colored white, while the unmatched cities remain gray.
The list can also be filtered by location in the map. Clicking anywhere in the world map will show only those cities within two degrees of the clicked location. At this time, you can search by name, or by location, but not both at once. In other words, when you click on the map, the name filters are ignored, and vice versa.
The longitude, latitude and time zone information for the currently-selected location are displayed in the boxes at the bottom of the window. If you feel that any of these values are inaccurate, you can modify them and press the Add to List button to record your custom version of the location. You can also define a completely new location by pressing the Clear Fields button, and entering the data for the new location. Note that all fields except the optional State/Province must be filled before the new location can be added to the list. KStars will automatically load your custom locations for all future sessions. Please note, at this point, the only way to remove a custom location is to remove the appropriate line from the file ~/.kde/share/apps/kstars/mycities.dat.
If you add custom locations (or modify existing ones), please send us your mycities.dat file so that we can add your locations to the master list.
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